Politics and Culture

July 30, 2017

Racist iconography

You may remember an art-world furore back in March when artist Dana Schutz's Open Casket painting of the murdered black teenager Emmett Till, on show at the Whitney Biennial, was the subject of a protest demanding that the picture be removed and destroyed. It was, you see, an unforgivable act of cultural appropriation. From activist Hannah Black's open letter:

Although Schutz’s intention may be to present white shame, this shame is not correctly represented as a painting of a dead Black boy by a white artist—those non-Black artists who sincerely wish to highlight the shameful nature of white violence should first of all stop treating Black pain as raw material. The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.

She later decided that only black people should be allowed to co-sign the letter.

Now the next logical step: activists are demanding that a Dana Schutz exhibition at the Boston ICA be cancelled, even though the Open Casket painting is not included. So great was Schutz's crime that she's become tainted goods:

Dana Schutz’s controversial Open Casket painting is no longer on view at the Whitney Biennial exhibition, which ended on June 11, but the artist remains persona non grata in the eyes of many artists and activists who insist she exploited black suffering in her work.

A handful of them have called for the Institute of Contemporary art in Boston to cancel a new solo exhibition of Schutz’s work, accusing the museum of cultural insensitivity and giving Schutz an undeserved platform....

Open Casket is not featured in Schutz’s solo exhibition at the ICA Boston, which the museum first began working on two years ago. But local artists and activists insist that none of Schutz’s work should be displayed in a museum setting.

“Please pull the show,” they wrote in an open letter to the ICA Boston on July 25, the day before the exhibition opened. “This is not about censorship. This is about institutional accountability, as the institutions working with the artist are even now not acknowledging that this nation is not an even playing field…[Open Casket’s] absence from the exhibition does not excuse the institution from engaging with the harm caused by the work by holding Dana Schutz accountable.”...

“At this point we are unconvinced that ICA has the will to challenge the egregiousness of continued institutional backing of this type of violent artifact,” the letter states in a reference to Schutz’s Open Casket, calling on ICA and other cultural institutions to “face the moral gravitas of reckless cultural insensibilities of artists in their charge…”

Five of the letter’s eight co-authors engaged in a three-hour discussion with Respini and others affiliated with the museum on July 20. “Given that neither the Whitney, nor the artist, nor the ICA, have adequately answered any of the concerns raised and advocated for so passionately by Black artists and critics during the Whitney Biennial, this strategy of silence minimizes the painting’s cultural significance and of cultural institutions’ responsibility to condemn racist iconography,” they write in their letter, again in reference to Schutz’s Open Casket. “Indeed, the ICA spinning such a narrative to engage damage control erases Black engagement with contemporary painting.”

Comments

Did you notice that the word "black" is capitalized but the word "white" is not? That's a VERY BIG liberal issue these days. It is taught in colleges and some newspapers include it in their official writing standards. The idea is that black is a race, and white is an arbitrary collection of people designed to suppress other races. Ta-Nahesi Coates always uses the phrase "people who believe they are white" instead of "white people". The left is consumed and obsessed with race.